at. Everett was the play. He stormed
and galloped through his scenes until everybody was helpless. People
like him; it's his third summer here. Well, at the end, nobody went.
A lot of lads in the gallery began calling for Everett. We're common
here; and not many of the quality patronize stock. Soon he pushed out
from behind the curtain and made one of those fool speeches which
generally fall flat. Only this one didn't.

Then I went "behind." The dressing rooms at the Alhambra are not
home-like. Bare walls with a row of pegs along one side--a couple of
chairs--a table piled with make-up stuff and over it a mirror flanked
by electric lights with wire netting around them. Not gay. And grease
paint, at close range, is not attractive. A man shouldn't cry after
he's made up--that's a theatrical commandment, or ought to be.
Probably a man shouldn't anyhow. But some do. I imagined Everett had,
and that he'd done it with his head in his arms and his arms in the
litter of the big table. I think I shook hands with him--one does
inane things sometimes--but I don't know what I said. I had something
like your experience--I just wasn't there for a minute or two.

Afterward, I went home with him--a long half-hour on the trolley, then
up three flights into "light housekeeping" rooms in the back. There
was cold meat on the table, and bread. The janitor's wife, good soul,
had made a pot of coffee. "Light housekeeping" is a literal
expression, let me tell you, and doctor's bills make it lighter. I
followed him into the last room of the three. It looked different from
the way I remembered it the afternoon before. When he turned the gas
higher I saw why--the bed was gone--one of those stretcher things takes
less room. Besides, they say it's better. So there she was--all that
he had left of all that he had had--the girl he'd been mad about and
married in our church a year ago. He wasn't even with her when she
died; there was the Sunday afternoon rehearsal to attend. She wouldn't
let him miss that. "Go on," she told him. "I'll wait for you." She
didn't wait.

And he faced it down, he jammed it through, that young chap did--and
was funny, oh, as funny as you can think, for hours, in front of
hundreds of people. He never missed a cue, never bungled a line, and
all the time seeing, up there in the light-housekeeping rooms, in the
last room of them all, how she lay, in the utter silence.

Perhaps I shall come acro